take 76. welcome to northwest new south wales where it never rains and it has rained pretty
much constantly for the last two weeks but this is what you want to see when you're specking
because the rain washes the dust and crud off the surface and hopefully it'll expose some opal
but i guess we're lucky and unlucky we're lucky we could even get out here to film this but anyway
hello and welcome to a new series of videos about lightning ridge and opal mining terminology like
any industry opal mining is full of jargon and buzz words that don't mean anything to people who
aren't in the know so what we're going to do is explore some of the stranger terms that get thrown
around on the opal fields and on the inside of the opal industry some of these words will be unique
to lightning ridge some of them exist across all of australia's opal fields it's a bit of a a mixed
bag but there'll also be some history and a lot of side tracks as we go so hopefully this
should be pretty interesting i spoke with Shaun Galman lightning ridge opal miner about a ton
of opal mining terms and we're going to start off with a triple feature on specking fossa king and
noodling there's a couple of nobbies just here so in this case we still have a couple of nobbies
visible it's been particularly good to see after the rain so we'll wash the rain will wash the dust
away from the dirt and it gives it a good cleanup so the nobbies become quite visible specking is
a term for finding opal on the surface just as a little historical aside the opel industry at
lightning ridge began because of opal found on the surface basically specked by jack murray
around 1906 he found what are now referred to as floaters there's a bit of bonus terminology for
you floaters are decent pieces of opal found on the surface where no mining has previously
taken place which in 1906 was everywhere and now back to the usual programming sometimes if you're
lucky enough you can just find it in undisturbed ground but usually you'll find out where mining
has taken place in the past so when we drill a hole so the dirt that came out of this shaft here
is positioned here so we watch it as it's coming out and once the opal level comes out we tend to
get on the heaps and have a spec to see if there's any traces any opal any nobbies any seam whatever
is the result of the field we're working in and in this case we did bring up several nobbies out of
this hole which was good to see it was good trace what we call good trace as you can see there's
one here there's another here under the dirt so that's a knobby there and there's also another one
sitting just there so when we're specking that's what we're looking for we're looking for the opal
in its natural state in dirt that's been dumped whether from a drill hole or an actual working
mine so a mullock dump is a designated area for the reclamation of all the dirt that we dig out
that is unwanted basically mullock is just your basic unwanted dirt the white heaps that you
see all around lightning ridge that make up the landscape that you recognize as lightning ridge
they're muller keeps so that's just all waste material from opal mining it can be taken away and
washed at a later stage if needed but generally toe dirt and the unwanted dirt that we don't
gouge so anything that has nothing to do with the opal level really will dig out and it is placed
here so very common activity for people who visit lightning ridge is to go fossicking or specking
specking is usually the term used when opal miners are legitimately out looking for opal
on the surface of the ground because they've just dug a mine and they've got some overburden to sort
through or because they're looking around after the rain and fossicking is usually the term that
applies to tourists and visitors lightning ridge has quite a few public fossicking areas that are
set up for tourists to do just that again if you're on someone's claim without their
permission it is still considered trespassing so you're not encouraged to just go out on the
opal fields and start looking for things that's a big no-no around here so there's a couple of
terms that we've heard a lot over the years and a lot of people aren't aware of the difference
between specking and noodling noodling was an old form of specking done in the early part of
the settlement of lightning ridge when no dirt was washed we'll look at machinery that's used to wash
opal in some other videos but it's important that opal nowadays when its mind is washed so almost
all opal that comes out of the ground part of the processing is to wash it with water in order
to remove the the dirt and hopefully expose the opal so everything was coming out of the ground
with windlasses and they were basically dumping in a doughnut-shaped ring around the hole and the
only way to find the opal at that point was what what was considered noodling back in the day all
of the processing of opal was done physically with mechanical means so there were there was machinery
like dry puddlers which was just a machine with physical veins in it that would pulverize the opal
to remove the dirt and hopefully leave behind the nobbies and various other machines like that
and noodling was just another method of trying to sort through what you've pulled out of the ground
using mechanical means because we just didn't have the technology that we have now we also didn't
have the boards to have access to water to be able to clean them using more efficient methods so
they'd take a small section of dirt and rake it across a board and use a secondary board to chop
up the opal clay and as they were chopping they generally feel a knobby or a bit of potch or a
bit of trace under the board so the opal clay would deteriorate very quickly and very rapidly
but the opal would stay as it is as a solid and that was the way the the old timers used to
go through their heaps there's a reference to this in the lightning ridge book by stuart lloyd and i
quote a noodler is a person searching dumps by hand for opal which the miners have missed a half
sheer blade often used to cut dirt and a ring is heard when porch or opal is struck
so specking fossicking and noodling are all largely interchangeable words now but there
is a distinction between them specking is finding opal on the surface and as a word that's usually
used by miners very rarely will you hear a miner use the word fossick fossicking means much the
same thing but it's mostly used to describe public areas set up for tourists to find opal
fossicking areas and noodling is also much of the same but it comes from an old mechanical
way of separating opal material from opal dirt back in ye oldie times of opal mining
special thanks to Shaun Galman for helping out with this video and a ton more of them to come
in the future and if you enjoyed this video and would like to see the rest of this series on opal
mining terminology peppered with a bit of history and anecdotes then please consider subscribing to
idu curiosity on youtube and following along on all of the social medias thank you for watching